Hi folks, I am just about to have a hissy fit......Can anyone tell me what might be happening to my Word documents and how I can remedy this situation?

I start up a document in Word 97-2003 doc, I work away saving occasionally and if I leave it for 10 minutes I find it automatically going into a 'Back-up' mode and the Document becomes a Backup of.....the original gone.

Sometimes I cut and paste onto a new document make a new reference for it and the same thing happens to that and I have now a whole swathe of 'Backup' documents in the folders.

I opened a letter I was working on this morning and made some pretty smart changes (I was in fine fettle this morning) and this back-up mode kicked in again, then out of the blue it comes up with an error message saying that the file cannot be saved because it is being used somewhere else on the PC....I'm storing this on a plug-in gadget.

No matter what you do, this file cannot be saved and you have to exit it, you can't cut and paste because there no access to the open document and once out all the changed data is lost I'd been working on for the last few hours and it reverted back to the document I opened before hand. Even though I'd 'saved' numerous times, it still went back to the opening document. - Naturally, I screemed.

It's driving me mad and I've never experienced this before with this damned machine - so what's going on - any ideas?

I'm using XP still and Microsoft Word

Sorry to bother you all with this

Thanks

You need to disable the autosave [save AutoRecover information every x minutes].

I can't remember where it is in your version, but take a look in the options.

I suspect "back up mode" is nothing to do with Word or XP but software designed to back your documents up. That is locking up your autosave so Word cannot then access it. Find it and allow it to use "volume shadow copy" or kill it while working on docs. Normal service should then be resumed.

And WTF still using XP? Take all references to your personal life off the machine because you WILL be owned shortly... (OK - maybe not shortly - but you know what I mean).

I suspect "back up mode" is nothing to do with Word or XP but software designed to back your documents up. That is locking up your autosave so Word cannot then access it. Find it and allow it to use "volume shadow copy" or kill it while working on docs. Normal service should then be resumed.

 

And WTF still using XP? Take all references to your personal life off the machine because you WILL be owned shortly... (OK - maybe not shortly - but you know what I mean).

Thanks Conniff and Bandit - I'll go looking.

TBH, I can't afford a new PC and although this one is well past it's sell-by date and Stuffed to the gills as far as memory goes on the hard-drive and it keeps telling me it's likely to crash any minute, I don't know what else I can do.

I'm not techi enough to be sure of changing software on here so I'm hoping I will last out until I can afford a new one, storing my files on remote drives.

I've accumulated a vast array of old emails in Outlook Express which I still need and use, I don't receive or send anymore and use Gmail and Hotmail now (Cloud systems I think you techi's call it) rather than OE which stores them on the hard drive, but I can find what I'm looking for in emails on OE for one or two of my long running cases - I mean I have at least 5-6 thousand and I am really trying to delete as many as I can as I go along, but it means reading through them all and time is a factor. If I could transfer them to another cloud system I wouldn't mind if they still showed up in the same format, but the last time I sent a bunch of emails to file they ended up as 'envelopes' with just basic details describing what they were underneath. I couldn't find a friggin thing after that.

So if there are any bright idea's where/how I can achieve that, then I'd try it....

Gotta start saving for a new PC - but it's hard right now.

Thanks for your help

A1

Thanks guys and gals, that seems to have solved the Word document problem..

Cheers..

A1

XP , full hard disc user. You can help yourself by taking a copy of all stuff you want onto an external hard drive via USB cable. ITB hard drive about £40. (Note you should save emails as HTML format or text format and that does away with the 'envelope thingy"). Your can then cut back on hard drive amount saved. (You find old documents them on your external hard drive).

For Browsing I recommend you use a LIVE LINUX distribution on a DVD/CD, as it will be up to date and avoid some Windows XP problems. Google "Live Linux" , Google "SLAX" or other Linux distribution "Linux Mint" etc. (over 800 ones to chose from). Burn the distribution from downloaded ISO format to Live Linux CD or DVD and run it from your DVD drive, after setting your computer to boot from DVD/CD as first option, if no CD/DVD it then starts on Windows. You can use a USB memory stick (bigger than 12 GB) in place of DVD.

This use of Live Linux with a small distribution keeps old computer hardware active for many years. City of Munich changed to Linux to avoid a) Microsoft fees for update from XP to Windows 7 and b) to keep old harware in use.. Good Luck.